no but you can cook your steaks on a GTX 580! The way it's meant to be grilled! Jensen said so him self.

I remember getting 2 580s (used) back in late ~ 2013 in order to SLI them. I think the manufacturer was Gainward or something similar. The 1st arrived with its heatsink detached from the PCB - I tried returning it to the seller but he wasn't willing to accept the return. I tried to stick the heatsink with various methods to the PCB and the 580 massive chip but all failed. In the end I used thick rubber to keep it in contact with the chip. But in a few days I started experiencing freezes and artifacts. Ans a bad smell... the 1st GTX 580 had RIP. In a few months the same symptoms appeared and the 2nd GPU RIP as well. Lesson: Never buy 2nd hand GPUs especially if they are meant to be grilled. I grilled them well..

Second hand GPUs can be ok, you just have to be careful about it. Make sure you get good images of the card so you can see if there is any visible damage. Get some information about the card's usage history. And make sure that the model of card you get is a good one, and likely to be in good shape even after a lot of use. Of course, there is no guarantee that the information the seller provides is accurate, but you will have a better chance of getting a good product this way than just getting something from a random listing.

I got my MSI 1080 Ti Gaming X used from ebay and it's in great shape, and even came with all of the original packaging. My last GPU was also used (from DoctorOfSpace), and the one before that was refurbished by the manufacturer, and all were great cards that are still working to this day. I haven't bought a brand new retail GPU for myself since 2012.

But of course, these were Maxwell and Pascal GPUs, not that Fermi rubbish :P

Yeah I have had little luck with used GPU. Most issues I have had was broken interconnects in the die package so cards would only work when heated (expansion allowed micro bumps to contact again)

depending on the generation and model some were susceptible to a limited amount of heat cycles and fail.

I had this very problem with a used 6800 Ultra I got from the US last year for a retro PC I wanted to built. Card cost me about $200 landed as they are hard to get in AGP and are collectable now.

Stopped working in winter. I found I had to preheat the die to get it to fire up and run without a fan to maintain operation, as soon as it cooled down it stopped.

I did have good luck with quadro cards and soft modding to geforce via driver straps and bit masks. I found the quadros to be manufactured at a different fab and their silicon is highly binned too as they over clock far beyond geforce variants with lower voltages. They are just built for longevity and reliability over the consumer geforce and they have not let me down as a used card. The drivers are up to date and supported 10 years min after release so you know they back the pro card. You'd want them to for the multi $k price tag on them lol.

This whole modding them and what not only applies to pre 07ish cards before pro and consumer drastically parted in design, before that quadro were just a top quality and binned geforce equvilant.

As for used cards now. Pascal and generally any AMD card from Fiji to now should be no probs as they have show next to no long term failures.

Anything from 2010 and prior is hit and miss with failures even when new common enough for concern.

GPU is a evga GTX 980 classified stock 1417mhz and I got a very mediocre OC to 1467.

This is were things get interesting.

idle total power is about 160W

CPU full load under prime95 or similar This is where I expected power to go out the window given what people say about FX CPUsTotal load 260W. Not as much as I expected.

SE CPU and GPU load, peaked 410W averaged 350W

GPU being maxwell was praised as efficient compared to the AMD offerings. This GPU has a TDP 175W

Furmark a whopping 550W!! GPU only load test. With in 10 sec my PSU fan roared up like it was taking off. Its a 850W unit so it was getting a work out.

Sometimes testing yourself is an eye opener when you take specs and general consensus as a guide.

I was doing this test to get an idea where a hypothetical Vega and Ryzen based system would compared to this in power and thermals. Honestly I thing Vega would be a good upgrade power consumption wise after seeing this lol.

Furmark is a power virus and isn't at all representative of the "normal" maximum power usage of a GPU. The whole purpose of the program is to push heat generation to absurd levels so the user can assess cooling performance.

Also, if you're measuring the input power to your PC (measuring "from the wall"), the numbers will be higher than what you would expect, since you have to account for the inefficiency of the PSU converting AC to DC (depending on the power supply, it could be somewhere in the range of 75-95% during medium to high load).

I have a GTX 1080 Ti and a significantly overclocked Ryzen 1700, and even when using Furmark and Prime95 together, using maximum power use settings, I still only draw about 650 watts of power from the wall, which means the PSU is outputting something like 570 watts (I have a 650 watt PSU, and it had no problem with that load).

yeah I get that, but my point is how insane the power usage of the maxwell are compared to anything I had prior and it's rated tdp. I always thought they were really low power GPUs.

My 3 way SLI gtx 9800s in my previous system only totaled 390w on furmark. I recall they had around 140w ? tdp for those.

Had a google on it and it does seem maxwell out runs it's rated power spec where in comparison pascal seems to stick to the rating pretty close. It might be the way they boost or perhaps they changed how they rate their tdp ? maybe at their stock base clock or something.

Also it's best to test cpu and gpu separate as when the cpu is loaded it can't push the draw calls to the gpu in order to load the gpu fully. When I run both furmark just stutters and it never leaves 2D clocks (135Mhz) and my usage is only 250w, less than just the CPU test alone which is because one thread is trying to do draw calls and leaves only 7 threads properly loaded.

The best way to measure without a current clamp on the PCIe cables and EPS 12V cables it to take the idle and assume -20% is the system and board, remainder is then half gpu idle and have is the CPU. Then you can get a good educated calculation on each part.

so if I get 160 then about 130 is gpu+cpu. So if my total is 550w for gpu only then I can take about 65w away, maybe make it 100W since it's doing draw calls.

So lets say 450W is the GPU then x by 0.85 for a typical higher end PSU as I have that gives about 382w actual at the GPU. That is still huge for something spec'd at 175w. So it must because the way it boosts. Since mine is water cooled it never goes below full boost clocks + my tiny OC , in fact I have never seen the base clock unless it is only loaded 10-15% when CPU staved or application limited.

the 2700X is what I really want too but another 6 months the 3000 series on 7nm should be out or close to. Which I might end up waiting for instead.

I have been looking for a good priced used Xonar essence or phoebus sound card for legacy hardware level EAX support for my older games and they are also one of the best in audio quality, tweaked 3rd party driver available from 3 different people. But they are so crazy expensive. I can't seem to find either used under 150 AUD (old discontinued model), new essence cards are around $500.

I got a xonar DG PCI card in my retro PC and it's much better than the Audigy 2 ZS I had before as none of the EAX features worked on the SB. Ironic considering creative invented and own EAX.

fx 8320 at 4.1-4.5Ghz8gb of 1600mhz ddr 3gtx 980 at 1467mhzbuilt in audio on an asus board, realtek i think?pair of old sata drives, 500gb and 1Tb from 2008850w thermaltake PSU from 2008Zalman reserator 1 passive water cooling from 2004, zalman water block on the CPU and full cover EK block on the GPU. 12v EK ? pump, model no loner exist today, not D5 or DDC but some other design. OS win 7 64

It's pretty basic and a mix of parts from my fist PC to free parts I got from friends and a few bits I upgraded. It's way overdue for an upgrade.

Thanks Vlad and Doc! So nice to talk to you guys again after being away for so long! Fate/Karma did some weird things to me this year. Okay so in June I found out the state govt (NY) was holding "unclaimed funds" for me in the amount of $1400 or so and I got excited and thought okay now it's time to upgrade since I'd had the same desktop since 2007! An 11 yr old quad core Q6600 2 GB DDR2 Windows XP system lol. So I picked out all the parts to get the system and on the exact same day that I was going to place the order for my new system my old computer's hard drive died. I could have easily replaced the hard drive but since I had everything saved I just went ahead and placed the order to get the parts to build the new one. Total cost for the parts above was actually $1600 or so. The extra $600 was spent getting extra stuff like a new additional monitor so I can run 3 screens (4 if you include my TV), a Cyberpower UPS because the power really sucks around here (lots of brown outs in the summer during peak heat usage and during TStorms, so consistent voltage is essential) and that gaming keyboard and mouse I mentioned. Another reason to get the Ryzen was that according to AMD this motherboard will be able to support 7nm Ryzen that comes out next year so I may upgrade to that if it's significantly better than what I have now. At that point I might even upgrade to 32 GB of memory. I really like the upgrade possibilities here. I'm really enjoying all these RGB effects on the keyboard, mouse, motherboard and the fans- I've never had anything like this before- computers have made great strides in the last 11 years lol.